Painting, Modelling and Gaming

Tag Archives: Tutorials

For any that have been waiting, here is the second (and final) part to my Battleboard tutorial. If this is the first post you’ve seen related to the Battleboard then please check out part one to get up to speed. 🙂

Last time we had finished painting the earth and rocky sections of the board and now we turn our attention to grass! (not that kind!)

Step 1: Once you have picked your first board you’ll need to mix up some PVA glue and water. The ratio is not an exact science but we went roughly 50-50. It should be around the consistency of milk. You’ll also need a tub of static grass from the handy scenery painting pack.

Now I would heartily recommend getting someone – buddy/wife/long suffering parent – to assist you with this part or you may end up with static grass all over your floor (and dog), like me… or you may be some kind of Shaolin scenery boss, in which case please carry on.

Step 2: Grab a nice, large sized paintbrush and we’re now ready to begin. One board at a time; start painting on the PVA glue on the earthy areas only. Try to leave a tiny bit of visible earth where the mud and rocks intersect. This will improve the overall effect at the end.

This is what your boards should look like. The watered down glue will sit and pool and shouldn’t run all over the place. If it is running then it’s too thin and you need to add more PVA to the mix.

Step 3: It is now time to add some flock/static grass. You can use any shade of grass you like for this. I went for the scorched grass rather than the nice bright green glade grass as my board will be used for more 40k than WFB games.

Carefully drop some grass from about 6 inches onto the glue portioned areas of the board – don’t worry about putting too much on because we can shake off the excess later, so pile in on!

Once you’ve reached this stage, I would go and put the kettle on and have a nice refreshing cup of tea and pat yourself on the back for a job well done 🙂

After about 15 minutes, pick up the board carefully and turn it on its side. Then tap the underside of the board to remove the excess grass. You can tap it reasonably hard as they’re quite robust but be careful because they’re not indestructible.

Also make sure you have put some newspaper or some other such material down so you can recapture the grass that falls off.

Once you’ve reached this point it would be helpful to get your extra pair of hands to assist in reclaiming the grass. In my case we just folder the paper edges up and poured the grass into a box lid.

After doing all 6 boards you will need to put them somewhere where they will not be touched or moved by anything while the PVA sets. I left mine in the spare room overnight. This is really important if you want a nice clean finish.

Step 4: TADA! After 24 hours, we are left with a nice grass laden board tile! There are still some clumps at this point but another good tap on the underside will remove them. to be honest every time I get the board out of the bag I loose a little more grass. It’s going to happen.

The skulls are very easy to do – if you’re happy with quick and simple? I drybrushed them with Ushabti Bone and and then washed them with Agrax Earthshade. When that had dried, I drybrushed them with Ushabti bone again and then lightly with Praxeti White.

That’s pretty much it. Of course you can vary from this guide wildy if you wish, it’s only meant to be a starting point. You could maybe try mixing a few different varieties of static grass together to create a different looking battlefield… or some snow? If you’re feeling creative. 🙂

Here was our first test run. I think it looks good but of course we now need to finish all the terrain and scenery to go on it! Please feel free to comment or ask questions. Always happy to help.

If you’ve been following on Twitter you’ll know that we’ve had a Realm of Battle board in the works for a while and as it’s now finished, we thought it was time we published a tutorial on how we painted it. I’m going to split it into two parts for sanity but hopefully you’ll find it useful for your own boards.

Step 1: Once unpacked and inspected for any damage, proceed to undercoat the board. We neglected to photograph this but to be honest, it’s just black spray paint. Now… I won’t lie, I used two and a half cans of GW Chaos Black undercoat! It is, hands down, my most expensive use of spray, ever. 🙂

Step2: I was lucky enough to get one of this GW Scenery Painting Packs from eBay for about £10 I think (RRP is about £25 I believe), so I’ve balanced out the pain of the undercoating costs! These packs actually aren’t too bad. They contain more PVA than you need, way more grass than you need, way more brown paint and ocre paint than you need and a nice big paint brush. Now, I’m not saying it’s worth £25 but it’s certainly worth the £10 I paid!

When the undercoat had completely dried, I got an old plastic tub, my brown paint and a decent sized piece of cardboard. I poured a little brown paint into the tub and dabbed the brush into it enough so that the bottom half of the bristles were nicely coated but not saturated with paint.

Then I wiped most of that paint off on the cardboard – much like you would do with kitchen roll if you were drybrushing a miniature – and then proceeded to paint the main earthy parts of the board. I deliberated left the rocky outcrops black at this stage. Now this is very similar to drybrushing but there is no magic formula I can really explain, but moderate pressure and fast sweeps was how I was trying to play it.

Step 3: Once this layer of brown had dried completely, I repeated this process with the Ocre colour that came in set. This time I used slightly less paint and less pressure as it’s supposed to be a highlight.

Step 4: Now it’s time to deal with the rocky parts! For this I go a slightly smaller brush – from the shed – but one that was bigger than the GW large drybrush and would happily take more of a battering. The colour was Eshin Grey and it was painted on in the same way as the brown but I was a little more liberal with the paint this time.

Steps 5 & 6: The next steps are to highlight those areas and for this I used the same brush as used for the Eshin Grey for the first highlight – Dawnstone – and then used a GW Large Drybrush to get the edges using Administratum Grey. It’s important to use less paint and be more subtle here. It will really lift these areas on the board if you don’t overcook it.

Thanks very much for reading, I hope you find some of this useful and please feel free to question or comment as you wish.

Today we’re sharing a great video from our friend Templars Crusade 01 – if you don’t know him, he is one of the outstanding YouTubers that shares modelling and painting tips and tutorials. He also does a lot of very useful product reviews. We find the videos helpful and his enthusiasm infectious! 🙂

So welcome, by the way of introductions, I’m Chris and I’m a long time Dark Angel player, an occasional worshiper of the sanguine and a big fan of tanks!

This is the starting point of something that may work out, but could get side lined if my beloved Dark Angels get un-nerfed by the much talked about new codex. This post is more of an intended plan for painting something new to me.

So why on earth would I ever opt to paint models with a colour that has always left me reaching for the undercoat spray, least of all an army where this colour occupies over 95% of the colour pallet? I’ll be honest with you, after 6 years of working for GW and over 20 + years of participating in this wonderful, albeit expensive hobby, I’ve finally decided to tackle the one colour that has caused me no end of grief……. Yellow.

So yup, you’ve guessed it – Imperial Fists. Dorn’s finest.

To start with, painting over a white undercoat is something that scares, well, frankly terrifies me. I’ve been far too comfortable painting over a black undercoat for many, many years. But in this instance, a white undercoat is it’s a necessity. Whilst yellow over black is possible, it takes far, far, FAR too long!! – even with Games Workshops foundation paint range and the new “base” range.

These are my thoughts on how I’m going to approach this task and are the bulk of this particular post. I’ll do an additional step-by-step write up after painting a unit. So without further ado, on with the game plan.

Stage 1: Clean the models. I really can’t stress this enough. Due to the methods I’m using for the rest of the plan this is the most fundamental and the most important step.

Stage 2: White Undercoat Spray. Don’t douse it. I’m expecting to carry out between 3 and 5 light dustings to get an even coverage. With black you can get away with 2 medium coats but white is less forgiving and more prone to running and pooling.

Stage 3: Mix up some Dwarf Flesh (Ratskin Flesh from the new range) with water, this will be deliberately thin as it’s intended as a wash. This should give a shading effect and allows me to see all of the detail on the model.

Stages 4-10: Dry brush starting with a 50/50 mix of Dwarf/Ratskin Flesh / Bleached Bone (Ushabti Bone from the new range), gradually adding more white until you’re dry brushing at least two layers of Skull White.

Next, this could be a leap of faith. The next stage is to ink/glaze a mix of Yellow Ink, the old one not the new pot. This is to be a mix of roughly 30/70 ink and water. This also allows some extra much needed drying time, as while it’s still wet I’ll try to get some Fuegan Orange into the recesses.

So we now have a nice yellow model. After that comes a real test of control, but instead of using paint, which is painful, we’re going to cheat, *ahem* … get creative.

Black paint mixed 50/50 with black ink and then 75/25 water. This may seem a bit nuts but it makes for a free flowing paint to use for all of the tubing and black areas. This should take 2 -3 layers but will also help as each layer will add a natural shade to these areas, all thanks to the white undercoat.

Almost there, Last thing is to opt for your shoulder pad trim colour. Green doesn’t quite work for me, neither do red and blue, and white and black also look a little odd – especially after highlighting and leaving them yellow would be cheating!

As the lesser of the evils above, I opted to go with green. Call it my preference for Dark Angels if you want. The big problem here is getting the colour dark enough that so it contrasts against the yellow. For this I’m planning to use few layers of Dark Angel Green (Caliban Green from the new range) mixed with black ink, followed by a fine edge highlight of Dark Angel Green mixed 75/20 with Snot Green (Warpstone Glow). Hopefully this will look like a off green black After this comes detailing the metal areas, which I’m intending on handling in my traditional black, Tin Bitz, Boltgun drybrush followed by a black &brown glaze then followed by a light dry brush of Boltgun and/or Chainmail.

That’s pretty much the plan, so let see how it goes on the next painting session. I’ll make sure I take a few pictures step by step so you can see where I have stayed on plan or opted to head off on a tangent.